VANITAS
: a journal of poetry, writings by artists, criticism, and essays. During its decade of intervention in the public realm, VANITAS came out quasi-annually, serving as a forum for international voices with an emphasis on coming to grips with current world situations. Each issue contained writings by artists whose primary modes were non-literary and featured the work of a visual artist. [www.vanitasmagazine.net]

Friday, April 23, 2010

TC: The New World and Trans/Versions: Two Views

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Tom Clark:The New World and Trans/Versions: Libellum, 2009

I...Michael Lally

Poet and translator Vincent Katz's Libellum press is proof that fine book making is not only not dead but alive and dancing.

The two latest publications from Libellum solidify the burgeoning reputation of the press as not only successful at creating fine books but at making available fine poetry.

Poet Tom Clark has been the main contributor to the Vanitas blog and is the sole contributor to his own poetry blog—TOM CLARK/BEYOND THE PALE—which to my mind is the best strictly poetry blog (where you go to read poetry, not opinions about it) on the web.

Now they've come together in the form of two books—THE NEW WORLD and TRANS/VERSIONS.

The latter is what some folks call a "chapbook"—meaning it's a very slim volume with a "saddle stitched" binding (meaning the pages are held together by two staples in the center of the middle two-page spread over which the pages are folded) and contains seven poems based on or translated from poems from other languages, including from the French (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme and Reverdy), Spanish (two poems by Vallejo) and German (Brecht).

They are delightfully insightful into the original intent, I believe, of the poets and of Clark's capacity for a kind of wisdom that few poets ever attain but most seem to always be writing as if they have. But Clark rarely if ever comes across as the sage, more like the older version of the guy who first made his mark as a humorous but brash young poet of the late 1960s and early '70s whose work fairly jumped off the page with the vitality of those times.

(Here's the last three lines from "Vallejo: The Vedic Fiber"—"What hasn't yet come along won't, but/what's already come and gone,/but what's already come and gone.")

I first learned of Clark as the poetry editor of The Paris Review who replaced the outdated stolid seriousness of poems based on what seemed by then ancient rhythms and/or self-serious ponderance with lighthearted, witty, and often close to incomprehensible experiments with language and subject matter that matched the musical soundtrack of those years.

He introduced us all to poets and styles that were what a lot of us had been trying to do ourselves or had at least been looking for and hoping others would discover and share, and there they all were, or a lot of them, in the poetry published in The Paris Review in those years.

Now, through his poetry blog BEYOND THE PALE he has become the sage our age needs (I mean "our age" as both these times and his and my actual years alive) and these two books demonstrate that for me. They still have a kind of ease with language that makes a lot of his lines seem conversational and simple, sometimes to the point of seeming obviousness, but then, there'll be that little or not so little turning on-a-dime that transforms what seemed simple and perhaps a given into something so much more subtle and graceful in ways only poetry seems capable of.

The poems in THE NEW WORLD capture that well, especially the ones that are more narrative, little stories about the people he encounters on his rounds in what I take as Berkeley, encounters that reveal the humanity in us all as well as the contradictions and challenges of accepting that. These poems in particular work as mini-movies for me, developing characters through close observation of their interactions and a story line that adheres to reality but nonetheless has an arc of narrative drive that satisfies.

They're too long to quote any in full (only a page or so but still) so here's a complete section (#4 titled "Flash Player 2008") from a different kind of narrative poem, the serial poem "A Retrospect" that opens the book (right after the earlier black-and-white family photo above that compliments the color one on the cover):

Strange to turn to old ghosts, watch ourselves dissolveIn their eyes. They were not here to help us,Merely to drag us back against our willInto a dim becalmed past, then forward intoOccluded presents which yet feel too bright.

These two books are the kind of treasures many book and poetry lovers I know delight in, because they are satisfying simply as objects, let alone for the original and often profound gems that can be found inside them.

Tom Clark’s The New World(Libellum, 2009) is one of a recent blessèd onslaught of Clark books: there is, too,Trans/Versions(Libellum, 2009)—works “after” Baudelaire, Reverdy, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Brecht, and Vallejo.

Took, d’abord, by the Trans/Versions, that insuperable splendid need to work (re-work) the textual “other,” to inhabit another, to fiddle—re-adjusting, gunning it a little—with the gears of the machine he (or she) assembled. Here’s Clark’s Rimbaud:

Tear (after Rimbaud)

Far from bird noise and lazy cattle and chatty girlsI knelt in a drowsy glade to drinkAs the purple mist of the afternoon closedIn on the green growing things around the lake.

Was there something in the water thereUnder those phantasmal mist-cloaked trees,A golden liquor, barley colored, jewelled,Under shrouded skies, that caused me to break out

In a strange feverish sweat? You couldHave made a Motel sign out of me I was so lit up,With half the neon on the fritzSpelling out VA*AN*Y into encroaching evening.

Then storm changed the sky: dark nations,Poles, columns, shelves and terminals of cloudBlown in a vast wave across the blue night.The stream escaped away through the woods

To white sands. A sharp wind came up.Sheets of isinglass spilled across the lake. To thinkThat intent as a searcher after Eldorado or a pearlI persisted still in stooping to imbibe!

Two mimick-moments: “closed / In on the green growing things” and “break out / In a strange feverish sweat?” That WilliamCarlosWilliamsian (thank you, Frank) “VA*AN*Y” spritzing its fritz’d solenoids like soda! The perfect foreboding of “dark nations” of cloud is akin somehow to the tawdry manufactory’d “Sheets of isinglass” (the “new world” inimical to even common natural phenomena). Here’s Rimbaud’s 1872 original (though apparently a somewhat lopped off version accompany’d the Alchimie du verbe prose of Une Saison en Enfer):

What was in this infant Oise I drank?Voiceless elms, flowerless grass, cloudy sky?What was in this colocasian gourd?Its dull golden liquor makes me sweat.

As it was, I would have made a miserable tavern sign.Storms kept changing the sky until nightfall.These were dark lands, lakes, and poles,Colonnades beneath the blue night, harbors.

Water from woods disappeared in virgin sands.Wind from the heavens tossed ice onto ponds . . .As if that would stop me from wanting a drink,Like a panner for gold or diver for shells!

In larme, literally “tear,” a sense, too, of the faux-modest drinker’s “drop” or “splash,” un tout petit peu (not meaning it). Clark’s Rimbaud is one of particulars (see, “chatty girls” fleshing out villageoises, or the lovely “golden liquor, barley colored, jewelled” for the straightforward liqueur d’or, fade.) And, supremely, see how mauvaise enseigne d’auberge expands to fill Clark’s whole third stanza, becoming a miniature of Clark’s sense of things, self and the “dark nation” both: “lit up,” and “on the fritz,” with the end of something “encroaching.” (One thinks of the plaice, the flatfish that turns colors dying.) That “VA*AN*Y” “reads,” beyond the hosteller’s usual “VACANCY,” as an unletter’d Johnsonian “VANITY,” what flourishes amidst our human, too human wishes.

In The New World: aging (“time now opens up its eyes, / Yawns, stretches, struggles in dark to discover / Where it is among whirling things, places, years”); “the fading vestiges of the American dream”; the “Persistence of Memory” (“The not remembering / Is not so bad, it’s the resurgence of not / Forgetting that ruins everything”); childhood’s way of returning unbid (or through music—“Is That All There Is? Peggy Lee sounded / Justifiably disappointed. Fever / Kindled in me such heat that, after hearing / It in the back of a convertible en / Route to a softball game in La Grange, or some / Such western outpost, my suppressed and / Unacknowledged passion for unsuspecting / Fourteen-year-old Jan D. so distracted / Me that, playing first base, I lost a popup / in the lights . . .”); loss of friends and cohort (Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan). The terrific final piece:

Here

To one about to leave it, how beautiful and largeAnd familiar—as the old saying goesAlmost like home. And yet, the almost sticksIn one’s throat, just as one was leaving,Why was it never better or more? What wasThe real thing one expected? Always somewhereElse and never here? And where do thoseWinding roads go, and what’s around the next bendAnd can this really be the end?

Never thought to skywalk, had doubtsThat got in the way of transcending selfWith its dumb momentary occupations,Timidly and confusedly entered cavesTo find the firelight on the wall dimly signifying,Felt awkward with the ins and outs of thought,Cheered inwardly oft for little reason,Was shy of others, never to draw nearYet longed for some company to be foundDown the line, can’t recall now where, in the endHoped only one day to find feet planted firmlyOn this ground, wanted only to be here.

Affirmatory against an omnipotency of odds. (I note a lovely rhyme between “the almost sticks / In one’s throat,” and yesterday’s line in William Fuller’s “Reply to Experience”: “in that small excess of ‘almost’ clouds appear.”) I love the acknowledgment in “our” era of rampant selfishness (and its self-serving multiples) of the commonest self, the one of “dumb momentary occupations.” Sense of a sloughing off of all “display”: how refreshing.

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Tom Clark blogs on Vanitas Site!!

For the foreseeable future, Tom Clark has agreed to blog on the Vanitas magazine site! This is amazing news, as Tom is not only prolific — but also highly entertaining, a genius, extremely knowledgeable, etc. Look for the "TC" tag in front of his post titles — and enjoy!

Vanitas 7 : The Self

For the seventh and final issue of VANITAS, we examine the idea of The Self. The work featured in issue 7 tests just how far the self can be stretched, partially as an exercise in self-expression, partially in search of what used to be called experience. Self, not so much in personae as in faces, in the sense the Mods used the term — referring to someone with style, perhaps within a culture of style, but an individual expression of that culture, or perhaps someone who can seemingly invent her own style, just standing there.

Available from Libellum !!!

Tom Clark: The New WorldTom Clark: TRANS/VERSIONSWe are excited to announce the publication of not just one but two books by Tom Clark — first and foremost his remarkable collection of new poems, The New World. In these poems, Clark trains his limpid style and eye on current street life in Berkeley, California. Clark's observational skill is informed by acute social critique and most significantly a heightened sense of time's rapid passage. There is personal history here, too, in poems to Philip Whalen and Robert Duncan. Youth is seen in retrospect, working up to present tense, ultimate doubts as it ends, or seems to. This book is accompanied by Clark's TRANS/VERSIONS, seven poems that are translations or homages to modern masters. Available through Small Press Distribution.

Recent Libellum Publications : Norma Cole and Basil King

Norma Cole : Natural LightNorma Cole’s book presents new poems by a modern master of the found and formulated — this book is divided into three sequences: “Pluto’s Disgrace,” “In Our Own Backyard,” and “Collective Memory.” Personal, global, universal: all three shift and interlock in repeating cadences. Their lock on reality provides consolation for these times.

Basil King : In The Field Where Daffodils GrowPart of King’s series “Learning to Draw” that brings to bear his talents both as writer and visual artist. This book contains the autobiography of a painting and contemplation of some heroes — Hartley, H.D., Williams, Demuth, Giotto, Nijinsky, Emily Carr, Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell. "Paintings stay alive because people look at them. And when they don't, they die."